Configuration

Arachne is fundamentally data driven, and Arachne's architecture may be viewed as an experiment in taking a "data-driven" approach to its logical extreme.

Every Arachne application is defined, first and foremost, by its configuration. The configuration defines every aspect of the application. This includes not only things that are traditionally "config" values like URLs, ports and connection info, but also much more fundamental aspects of the application including:

Dependency injection

HTTP Routes and endpoints

Database migrations

Asset processing

Anything else that can possibly be represented as data.

Because the configuration is so central to an Arachne app, it needs to be both easy and powerful to query and manipulate. To this end, the configuration is implemented as a full featured, in-memory Datomic (or DataScript) database.

Schema

Configurations have a schema, which is assembled from the schema of the included modules. This schema is Datomic schema, enhanced with additional meta-attributes to provide a robust entity type model inspired by ontology definition languages such as OWL.

The configuration schema is intended to define the concepts that can exist in an application, and the possible relationships between them.

So, while an Arachne configuration database describes a particular application in great detail, the configuration schema defines the set of possible applications for a given set of modules, and the choices that are available to application authors.

Config Initialization

While a Datomic database is very powerful and has a great many virtues, being readable in its raw form is not one of them. Transaction data for complex entity structures is verbose and not very human friendly.

In order to fulfill its goal of being easy to use, Arachne provides a configuration DSL that allows users to write simple, idiomatic Clojure forms that incrementaly build an application configuration. In essence, these configuration scripts are a small Clojure program that writes the configuration, and the configuration is handed over to the runtime to be started once it is complete.

Runtime

A configuration is just data in a database. It doesn't actually do anything until it is used to initialize an Arachne runtime.

The fully-qualified name of a Clojure function that can be called to obtain an instance of the component.

When the runtime is started, it searches for all the component entities in the configuration, and builds a dependency graph. It then calls each component's constructor function to obtain an actual instance.

Components may be of any type, although it is required that they support Clojure's clojure.lang.IPersistentMap protocol (i.e, be a map or a record) if they are to have any dependencies, since dependencies are added by associng a keyword.

Component objects may also satisfy the com.stuartsierra.Lifecycle protocol from Stuart Sierra's "Component" library), implementing start and stop methods that will be called when the system is started and stopped, respectively.

Finally, the runtime wires each component together with its dependencies, and calls start on each of them in dependency order. At this point, the full Arachne system is running.

Note that an Arachne runtime is based off a single configuration value. The configuration itself is immutable at that point. If the configuration needs to be changed, then a new runtime needs to be constructed.

Modules

Arachne is not a monolithic library. Any Arachne application is built from many different modules, each implementing some feature set or providing some particular functionality. Some modules, such as the base arachne-core or arachne-http are "official" modules and integral to the Arachne system; however, the hope is that Arachne will also develop a thriving ecosystem of third-party and open-source modules.

At a concrete level, an Arachne module is a Maven artifact containing Clojure code (or AOT compiled class files), packaged and delivered like any other. Modules can contain library code that users may call, just like any other Clojure library.

The distinguishing feature of an Arachne module compared to any other Clojure library is that each module JAR has an arachne.edn file at the root of the classpath, containing metadata about the module, its dependencies and its hooks into the Arachne system.

Modules may declare dependencies on other modules, and an Arachne application may depend on any number of modules. Only modules that are directly or transitively required by a given application are considered to be "active"; merely being present on the classpath is not sufficient to cause a module to be active in a given system.

Modules have hooks that allow active modules to participate in an Arachne system in a variety of ways. Specifically, these hooks are:

schema: Each active module provides some configuration schema, defining the concepts, entity types and data that it exposes or expects to be present in the configuration. Modules may reference entities or attributes defined in the schema of modules that they depend upon.

initializers: When creating a configuration, after the schema is installed, each module has an opportunity to transact some initial data to the configuration. Module initializers are applied in dependency order: that is, the initializers of required modules are applied before the initalizers of the modules that depend upon them.

configure: Each module also has the opportunity to query and update the configuration, after modules that depend upon it have been initialized and configured. Module configuration is applied in reverse dependency order.

In addition, modules usually provide a library of DSL forms that make it easier to create and manipulate the configuration entities that they define in their schema.

Applications

An Arachne application is just a special case of an Arachne module, where the module initializer is (usually) a user-supplied configuration script.

The API for initializing a new Arachne config requires users to specify the name of an Arachne application, which will be discovered in a classpath-relative arachne.edn file in the same way that it is for modules.

Startup Sequence

Based on the above description of modules and the runtime, the complete initialization and startup sequence for a specific Arachne application is as follows:

Building the configuration

A graph of active modules is determined, starting with the application and its dependencies.

A schema is assembled by asking each active module if it has any schema to contribute (via its schema hook). A fresh configuration is built, with a schema that is the union of the active module schemas.

In dependency order, each module has the opportunity to update the fresh configuration using its initializers hook. The application itself will have its initializers (including any user-supplied DSL scripts) called last.

In reverse dependency order, each module has the opportunity to query and update the configuration using its configure hook. The application will go first, and the module with the fewest dependencies (which will always be arachne-core), last.

Initializing the runtime

The configuration is passed to the runtime initializer function, which will instantiate all the components by calling their constructors.

Starting the runtime

Each component object will have it's com.stuartsierra.component/start method called, in dependency order, after having all its own dependencies assoced on.